Posted 10 December 2012

Final call for Sportsfriends! Support local multiplayer!

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Over the past few weeks, the Sportsfriends designers and I have been posting about the four indie multiplayer games that we’re hoping to bring to PS3 as one action-filled compendium.

Noah Sasso told you about BaraBariBall – a carefully balanced fighting game that plays like a stylized mix of Super Smash Brothers and volleyball.

Bennett Foddy, the creator of browser game classics like QWOP and GIRP, wrote about his head-to-head physics-based pole-vaulting game, Super Pole Riders.

Ramiro Corbetta told you about his popular 2 vs 2 minimalistic sports game Hokra.

And I posted about Johann Sebastian Joust, a multi award-winning, no-graphics motion control game that uses PlayStation Move controllers and feels more like a 21st century martial art than a videogame.

We’ve exhibited all four games around the world at festivals and parties, and now we want to get them into your living room. But we need your support on Kickstarter to raise enough development funds. Today is the final day of our campaign!

For us, Sportsfriends is a passion project. We believe that local multiplayer is a hugely rewarding way to play games, and we hope to demonstrate that it’s still viable for indies like us to develop these kinds of games. We love all sorts of videogames of course, but we feel like local multiplayer has been a bit overshadowed in the last decade with the rising popularity of online play.

Why local multiplayer? There’s nothing quite like playing games with your friends on the same couch or in the same physical space, yelling, laughing, trash-talking, and just plain old having a good time. There’s a certain magic playing in front of raucous crowd, or seeing the facial expressions of your opponents.

Think back to the console games you used to play in your friend’s basement, the playground games you improvised at school, or the games you played at the arcade. Those are the kinds of gaming experiences that have inspired Sportsfriends. We want to breathe new life into local multiplayer, taking it into the 21st century. We want to make deeply replayable games that will last the test of time. We want to call attention to what happens in front of the screen, between the human beings playing and spectating.

But today is the final day of our Kickstarter campaign, and we need your help to make it happen. Support us now and pre-order four extensively tested multiplayer games for PS3. Support local multiplayer!

I can’t support just local multiplayer. It was a lot easier to have gaming friends come over for multiplayer games back when I was at school all those years ago playing Bomberman and Street Fighter II. These days I do not. I don’t really have any friends who are into video games (most of my social circle comes from the drama group I’m in so they’re more into going out to the theatre and such) which is why I need online features in games (still waiting for that supposed online patch for Double Dragon Neon, a game I already love playing in single player but feel I’m missing out greatly not having a buddy to join in). It’s why I’m happy for games to have local multiplayer but I won’t be buying them unless they support online as well. It’s great to load up a multiplayer game and find someone to play against even if it’s like 2am in the morning.